Lawsuit: More Than 2.5K Dead People Are Registered to Vote in Detroit

More than 2,500 dead Americans remain on the voter rolls in Detroit, Michigan, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) filed a lawsuit in federal court this week against the city of Detroit for allegedly failing to maintain their voter rolls, including keeping more than 2,500 dead Americans aged 85 and older on the rolls.

After obtaining voter data from the state of Michigan earlier this year, PILF researchers said they discovered that a number of registered voters had either “impossibly old” or “disqualifying young” date of births. In one case, for example, PILF researchers said they found that a registered voter stated they had been born in the year 1823.

In addition to dead voters remaining on the voter rolls, PILF alleges that Detroit’s voter registration rate as of 2016 for the citizen voting-age population stands at 106 percent — indicating more voters on the rolls than those who even live in the city.

PILF also states that Detroit has about 4,788 registered voters who have been flagged as having potentially registered to vote twice or even three times. Another roughly 16,500 registered voters allegedly do not have dates when they actually registered to vote.

PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement:

The City of Detroit is failing to perform some of the most basic functions owed to its citizenry.  The city government’s nonchalant attitude toward addressing evidence of dead and duplicate registrations exposes yet another vulnerability in our voting systems as our nation works to improve election security before November 2020. Making a federal case out of this was necessary, and I hope we can achieve a resolution before the polls open.

Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox said in a statement that the lawsuit seems to have shed light on fraud and incompetence taking place in Detroit:

When thousands of dead people are registered to vote and there are more people registered than are eligible to vote in the city of Detroit either someone is trying to commit fraud or there is gross incompetence within the Detroit city clerk’s office.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The case number is 2:19-cv-13638.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.